Froogle gets a boost from Google’s promotion

With new promotion by Google, online shopping service Froogle’s share of Internet traffic shot up 319%, reports Internet traffic measurement company Hitwise.

As soon as Google began promoting its Froogle online shopping service, Froogle’s share of Internet traffic shot up 319% and pushed Froogle into the top 10 shopping sites, reports Internet traffic measurement company Hitwise.

Hitwise attributes Froogle’s surge to Google’s having placed a prominent link to the online shopping service above the search bar at Google.com. “Google’s promotion of Froogle is particularly interesting in light of Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Kelkoo, one of the largest European comparison shopping services,” Hitwise says.

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“Yahoo and Google’s recent actions indicate that the next battlefront in the search engine war will be comparison shopping,” says Bill Tancer, Hitwise vice president, research. “It’s also interesting to note that competitive lines are blurring between these two major players. According to Hitwise clickstream data, on Monday the number one domain visited after Froogle was Yahoo! Small Business, capturing 12.4% of all downstream Froogle visits. This indicates that a good portion of the products featured on Froogle are being sold by small businesses on Yahoo’s small business service.” By comparison, Hitwise reports that the e-retailer receiving the next highest downstream of visits from Froogle was Amazon with 1.61%.

According to Hitwise, other leading retail sites receiving downstream visits from Froogle on Monday March 30 were eBay.com, WalMart.com, Overstock.com and BestBuy.com.